January 2015 Guest Editor Harriet Evans on Venetia...
I was in bed ill for a couple of days last month. As any Georgette Heyer fan knows illness is no bad thing because it means you can reread a Georgette Heyer. I reread Regency Buck and then Venetia and remembered again why Venetia is my favourite of hers. I have converted many to the church of Georgette. If you haven’t tried her, please give her a go. She’s so good and I think people who don’t know her think she’s soppy and she’s absolutely not. She is witty, elegant, gripping, gorgeously romantic, and this one is universally acknowledged to be her at her best.
In all her twenty-five years, lovely Venetia Lanyon has never been further than Harrogate, nor enjoyed the attentions of any but her two wearisomely persistent suitors. Then, in one extraordinary encounter, she meets a neighbour she only knows by reputation - the infamous Lord Damerel - and before she knows better, is egging on a libertine whose way of life has scandalised the North Riding for years. Yet again Georgette Heyer shows the qualities that made her one of the most successful and best-loved romantic novelists of her age, and why her popularity endures to this day.
'My favourite historical novelist - stylish, romantic, sharp, and witty. Her sense of period is superb, her heroines are enterprising, and her heroes dashing. I owe her many happy hours' -- Margaret Drabble
'Wonderful characters, elegant, witty writing, perfect period detail, and rapturously romantic' -- Katie Fforde
'A writer of great wit and style ... I've read her books to ragged shreds' -- Kate Fenton Daily Telegraph
Author
About Georgette Heyer
Author of over fifty books, Georgette Heyer is the best-known and best-loved of all historical novelists, who made the Regency period her own. Her first novel, The Black Moth, published in 1921, was written at the age of fifteen to amuse her convalescent brother; her last was My Lord John. Although most famous for her historical novels, she also wrote eleven detective stories. Georgette Heyer died in 1974 at the age of seventy-one.
